Wednesday, June 03, 2015

A big part of the Labour party's failure over the last six years is that it is a dysfunctional organisation, riven by ambition and backbiting, where MPs constantly leak against the party in order to advance their own agendas. We saw this with every change of leadership, and we've just seen it again with the leaking of Labour's post-2014 election review. The full text of the review's findings is here, and they're pretty much what you'd expect: the party was disorganised and underfunded, and its many of its electorate candidates put their own success ahead of the party's. As for solutions, it states the obvious: message discipline, a clear relationship with potential support partners so voters can see what a Labour-led government would look like, a focus on the party list - there's also demands for Labour to be "seen as pro-business" and for it to pillage local branches assets to fund the central organisation (good luck with that). But the best bit is this:

It is imperative that Labour acts - and is seen to act - as a disciplined and coherent team that is ready for government if it is to win the trust of voters in 2017.

The mere fact that we are reading this suggests that not all of Labour's MPs agree with that. And as long as they don't, they will continue to lose. To go back to Danyl's hierarchy of political needs, nobody votes for a fratricidal gaggle of rivals and enemies, and nor should they.